Various medical imaging techniques exist to aid clinicians in the diagnosis of pathological conditions caused, for example, by anatomic or functional manifestations of a disease. Many such techniques produce a sequence of image frames that can be used to highlight to the clinician various temporal variations in anatomical and/or functional properties of a patient. As one example, PET imaging can be used to obtain a sequence of image frames showing, for example, how the physiological functional properties of a patient's organ, such as, for example, the brain, vary over time. However, during a PET image acquisition period, data may be acquired for multiple scan positions of several minutes per position and then written to a file. During this time, a patient may breathe regularly. However, respiratory motion of the patient during the scan (which occurs for several breath cycles) may result in degradation of the final image (e.g., image blur and quantitation inaccuracy) and thus less accurate medical diagnosis based on the final images.
In one example, to mitigate respiratory motion effects, the acquired data may be respiratory gated (e.g., broken into like-displacement bins per respiratory cycle) or only a portion of the data acquired under a more quiescent-like (e.g., flat) portion of the respiratory cycle may be kept. However, gating may only be beneficial for data acquired from patients with certain breathing patterns (e.g., patterns that are more consistent or have a more defined quiescent period in each cycle). Discarding portions of the acquired image data increases noise in the image data which may further degrade the resulting image.